V. Press poet Jacqui Rowe hosts her final Poetry Bites on Tuesday, 28 November, after more than ten years running the Birmingham poetry night. Jacqui will be one of the guest poets reading from her V. Press collection, Blink. The other guest will be Antony Owen, who has been a great supporter of Poetry Bites over the years, and given some memorable readings, both as a guest and from the floor. Antony’s collection, The Nagasaki Elder, has also recently come out from V Press.

Food will be served from 6.30pm and the event begins at 7.30pm. Entry: £5 (£4 concs) including readers. Venue: The Kitchen Garden Cafe, York Road, Birmingham B14 7SA. Please contact Jacqui Rowe (jacquiroweAThotmailDOTcoDOTuk) if you’d like a floor spot.

(Poetry Bites will continue next year in the capable hands of Elaine Christie and Matt Nunn.)

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY (PBS) OFFER

The Poetry Book Society is delighted to announce the release of the new look Winter Bulletin featuring exclusive poems and unique commentary from major worldwide poets!

The Poetry Book Society was founded by T S Eliot in 1953 to ‘propagate the art of poetry’. Members get the best contemporary poetry books delivered straight to their door every quarter alongside the bulletin magazine.

To celebrate the new look bulletin, we’re offering V Press Blog readers a special 10% discount rate across all our membership options. Simply enter the code VPRESS at the checkout here. Christmas gift membership options are also available.

The Winter Bulletin will be launched from 7pm on the 8th December at the Poetry Society Café in London. We do hope you can join us for a stellar performance from five internationally acclaimed poets: PBS Choice Sasha Dugdale, PBS Recommendations Paul Deaton, Tim Dooley, Ahren Warner and PBS Special Commendation Fleur Adcock. Tickets are available here.

It's been a delight to publish these pamphlets and V. Press is very very proud of all its authors - the press is its writers, readers and all those involved with it, including our fabulous poetry covers from V. Press designer Ruth Stacey.

The Awards will be announced at a dinner at the British Library on Tuesday, 12 December, where Sarah Leavesley will be giving a three minute presentation about the V. Press 2016/17 pamphlet list.

Other presses shortlisted are Mariscat Press, The Poetry Business/Smith Doorstep and Rack Press. The awards are run by The Wordsworth Trust and The British Library, with the generous support of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, in association with the TLS and Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS), in Washington DC and in Nafplio Greece. More about this year's shortlisted presses and individual pamphlets can be found here.

The judges’ comments include: "The V. Press offering of four remarkably diverse pamphlets included a mix of established and new writers. We fell in love in particular with Alex Reed's pamphlet ‘A Career in Accompaniment’ about looking after his wife - quiet poems, carefully crafted, with enormous emotional heft and dignity. "

To celebrate this shortlisting, all four V. Press pamphlets from this 2016/2017 are available below with £1.50 off their usual price. [This offer is for U.K. delivery only and runs until the end of 2017, and through the links below only.]

Tell Mistakes I Love Them exposes social nerves and pokes at the wounds with poems that are very vulnerable and very poignant.

Scare Stories is a sequence of poems that is very unusual and very unsettling.

Fragile Houses is very authentic and very fervent.The pamphlet includes a photographic sequence from S.A. Leavesley that is directly inspired by the poems’ vivid mix of fragility and sharpness.

A Career in Accompaniment is a pamphlet of love, loss and surprising lightness. Based on Alex Reed’s personal experiences, these poems witness what it is like to care for a lover with severe illness. This poetry of “fragile places” is very intimate yet very universal.

2017 has been our busiest year yet, with four poetry pamphlets, three full collections and two fiction pamphlets.

The first V. Press poetry pamphlet for 2018 is How to Parallel Park by James Davey, followed by Jenna Plewes' Against the Pull of Time in summer 2018.

Also for 2018, V. Press has Unable Mother, a debut poetry collection from Helen Calcutt, a poetry collection from Brenda Read-Brown, a flash fiction novella that draws on the techniques of prose poetry by Michael Loveday and a flash pamphlet from Tino Prinzi.

But the press will be looking for new poetry titles for later in 2018...

SUBMISSIONS NEWS

V. Press managing director and editor Sarah Leavesley was pleased to take part in a short interview with Jim Harrington about the press at Six Questions For... (The questions and answers here.)

Although titles for the start of 2018 have been scheduled, V. Press is hoping to re-open a general poetry submissions window early next year. The press will be looking for poetry titles for the second half of 2018 and going into 2019.

For more information about new titles and submission windows, please follow V. Press on twitter at @vpresspoetry and sign up for the press newsletters (below or the side-bar on the right-hand side of the webpage).